lower that cortisol queen !

photo credit - Pinterest

Hello Radio family, happy Thursday! When I’m writing this blog it is currently Tuesday and my friends and I just got back from the beach. With all of the nice weather we’ve been having these past two weeks, my friends and I have gone on side quest after side quest. As much fun as it's been, I can’t really enjoy it the way I'd want to because it feels like the warmer it gets, the more assignments my professors give me. While I thoroughly enjoy spending time with my friends, it sometimes puts me in a position where I have to choose between doing an assignment on time, or going out with my friends but staying up super late trying to catch up on work. Lately I've been choosing the latter... A LOT. I'm the kind of person who simply cannot have fun when I know that there is work to be done so it honestly surprises me that I constantly keep putting myself in situations that cause my anxiety to spike. This level of anxiety has been a recurring factor in my life, but I've only started to pay more attention to it recently.

Lately I've spent a lot of time thinking about stress management and have been trying to "slow down mentally" so to speak. I've been sort of joking to my friends lately about wanting to "lower my cortisol levels", but I'm kind of being serious. It is so easy for me to over think myself into a spiral and get myself worked up over something that is either out of my control or not that big of a deal. From personal experience, I can strongly say that living in a perpetual state of worry is exhausting, yet it's hard to get out of. Since we are nearing the end of second semester, I've done a lot of reflecting on first semester me versus me now, and I've grown a lot in many different ways, but my ability to worry myself into a frenzy has remained true.

As funny and obvious as this may sound: I think worrying is such an easy thing to do. Is it something that we should constantly be doing to work ourselves up? No, but some things are easier said than done. I've been told a couple times that I live my life in extremes and after I heard that, it honestly revealed a lot about myself. For me, things are either really good or really bad and very rarely is there a happy medium. I think that worrying can actually be good in certain situations though. It can act as a (healthy of course) form of motivation and potentially stop you from entering situations you aren't supposed to be in. On the other hand, worrying can also be an all consuming feeling. I think that for most people it's easy to find a happy medium (if there is such a thing) when it comes to worrying, but I've realized that my sense of worry tends to be very do or die.

My friend Kiera is actually pretty good at noticing whenever I'm overthinking something and she almost always is able to talk me out of it. A lot of the times she says things that I've already considered, but sometimes it is nice to listen to someone negate your worries even if they are repeating things that you may already know.

To tie all of this back together, worrying and stress are completely normal, but they shouldn't be the "end all be all" in our lives. When I was out with my friends today, though I was stressed about the amount of work that was waiting for me, being out also helped spark the idea for this blog! While feelings of worry and stress are very natural human responses, if I can give you any advice from my very limited arsenal it would be to find a happy medium, or as I now like to call it the "golden middle". I'm not going to sit here and tell you not to worry because that would be kind of pointless and annoying (and hypocritical lol), and I actually do think that stress can be good motivation at times. This however doesn't mean it should be an all consuming level of stress. Find a happy medium and if you have a friend who can keep you grounded, that's even better☺️.

photo credit - Pinterest (when I think of worrying and stress, I think of Tweak from SouthPark so I had to include him lol)

I wish I could have spent this blog telling you guys how to stop worrying, but I'm still trying to figure that out myself. When I finally master it, you guys will be the first to know trust me!!!

I hope you all have a stress free day and an even better weekend.

With love always,

~Side Note XOXO! 💋